Open to: All current BCARES members and anyone else wanting to learn about the organization

LONGMONT -- Sebastian Wessels sat in his "Ham Shack" -- basically a children's playhouse in his yard he's converted to be the base for his amateur radio operations -- and tweaked a dial. Out of the speakers came two Japanese voices having a conversation with each other.

"The last guy I talked to was in Grenada," said Wessels, a South African native who has had his ham radio license since 1991. Then he still lived in his native land; he got an American license when he moved to the U.S. in 1996.

Wessels is a database administrator for IBM by trade and a self-described "ham," as ham radio operators call themselves. The tiny building he operates out of -- with a "Ham Shack" sign posted outside -- is jammed with all manner of hardware, cables and computer screens. One of those displays a computer program he has that tracks, automatically, all of the people all over the world he's talked to, and, when he communicates with someone new, brings up information on that person based on their call sign.

If the phrase "ham radio" seems like a blast from the past in this age of the Internet and smart phones, think again: According to the latest numbers from the National Association for Amateur Radio, there were 704,236 amateur radio license holders in the U.S. as of March 2012, an all-time high. That figure is up from 662,600 in 2005.

But is it a hobby that is being embraced by young people? That depends on who you talk to.

"We're having trouble getting them into it," said Jerry Schmidt, secretary of the Longmont Amateur Radio Club. "When I look back over my time, I was into amateur radio in 1963."

The call sign for Sebastian Wessels, NS0W, is seen on the top of the door to his "HAM Shack" on Tuesday in Longmont.
(
Matthew Jonas
)

Of course, Schmidt is a few years older now, and his group is doing what it can to attract younger members, including attending Boy Scout gatherings to talk about the hobby. They do have a few offspring of LARC members who have expressed an interest as well, he said.

The Boulder Amateur Radio Club, on the other hand, has a program called BARC Juniors geared specifically toward youth ages 6 to 18. Ellie Van Winkle and her husband, "Rip," co-founded BARC Juniors after hearing a presentation many years ago given by young hams at the annual "Hamvention," the amateur radio convention held annually in Dayton, Ohio.

"They had a forum," Ellie Van Winkle said. "The children talked, not the adults. The children talked and said, 'This is what we do.'"

She was so inspired that upon returning to Boulder she and her husband launched the BARC Juniors program, which is now in its 21st year. Serving as "Elmers," ham radio's expression for teachers, or mentors, the couple have helped more than 200 young people get their amateur licenses over the years.

And membership in BARC Juniors has remained fairly consistent over the years, she said.

"We've been up to three dozen and we're at 24 now," Van Winkle said.

'Bragging rights'

Back at the Ham Shack, Wessels pursues his ham hobby DX-style, DX being a ham's term for long-distance communication.

He's a member of the American Radio Relay League's DX Century Club, meaning he's communicated with other hams in at least 100 other "entities."

In the world of DX, he explained, the U.S. actually consists of nine entities. There are 350 of them globally, and the goal of a DXer is to communicate with as many of these entities as possible, and the more remote the better.

DX Magazine puts out a list of the "most wanted" spots around the globe for Dxers. At No. 1 is North Korea. The No. 2 is a site within U.S. territory: Navassa Island, which is off the coast of Cuba. It's No. 2 because it's a fish and wildlife preserve, so hams -- and especially their antennas -- aren't exactly welcome.

"I really started the DX part of the (hobby), the distance part of this deal, about five years ago when we moved to this location," said Wessels, who lives just outside Longmont.

Ham radio operates on line-of-sight communication, and from inside his shack he directs his large antennae to a part of the globe he wants to talk to. Atmospheric conditions and whether he's beaming his signal over land or see can affect his signal strength, he said.

As a demonstration Wessels "worked" -- ham parlance for communicated with -- a German man who was broadcasting out of Belize.

He'd never worked that "call" -- short for call sign, all-important in the ham radio world -- before, so for Wessels it was another contact to add to the list. It was not such a big deal for the German guy, Wessels said, to talk with someone in Colorado, U.S.A.

"For him it's easy," Wessels said. "Everybody wants to talk to Belize; there's hardly anybody there. In the U.S., you have 700,000 people -- in Belize you have about 20 people."

The U.S. is second in the world in terms of ham licenses. Japan is No. 1 with about a million. There are about 2.5 million licensees globally.

'Public safety'

Schmidt loves ham radio for reasons completely different from Wessels'.

"I view the hobby more from a public safety standpoint," said Schmidt, whose activities with the board include making preparations for the group's annual LARCFest, which this year will be the first week of April.

He is also a member of BCARES. The Boulder/Broomfield County Amateur Radio Emergency Services group is celebrating its 35th anniversary this year, and its upcoming annual meeting -- the only one all year -- is Jan. 28.

"The last (event) we did was the holiday parade (in Longmont)," Schmidt said. "We had six or eight hams out there along the parade route. If anything went crazy we could radio back to the leadership."

BCARES has antennas set up on the top of the Longmont Police station and Longmont United Hospital, and it has an antennae and a workspace inside the Boulder Office of Emergency Management.

"We have used them for everything from being our ears, or our communication, from a shelter site -- when we have a temporary shelter set up," said Merrie Leach, the emergency management coordinator with the Boulder OEM. "They would just be there to act as radio communication for the shelter site, because the Red Cross doesn't necessarily come with radios."

For example, during the Four Mile Fire, the Coors Events Center on the CU-Boulder campus was used as a shelter, and hams were able to let the OEM know when the shelter was getting full, or if items such as blankets or water needed to be delivered.

"They have video crews that can go out with cameras and let us know what's going on at a particular disaster site," Leach said. "Video is especially important.

"Last year they helped with siren testing. (It helped) having a group of trusted volunteers go out and say, 'OK, this is how they behaved.'"

The year after the Four Mile Fire, Allen Bishop, chairman of the BCARES board, founded MERN, the Mountain Emergency Radio Network, Schmidt said. As someone who lived in the Four Mile burn area, Bishop understood how important maintaining communications were during a such a horrific event, Schmidt said.

"In emergencies, you lose the infrastructure, and our goal, as a ham radio operator, is to be able to operate without the infrastructure," Schmidt said.

Added Leach, "It has increased (mountain) communities' and Boulder County's communications capacity so much that it has really made those mountain communities that much more resilient.

"As we talk to our colleagues in other areas (around the state) about that, we can really see how fortunate we are to have the relationships that we have with, really, all of the agencies and the organizations like (BCARES) around here."

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